Pixelated polarizers array based coded aperture snapshot spectropolarimetric imaging with side information

Imaging spectropolarimetry is a promising technology in the fields such as biomedicine, planetary exploration, remote sensing, and so on. In this paper, a coded aperture snapshot spectropolarimetric imagery is developed by incorporating a pixelated polarizers array (PPA) into the coded aperture snapshot spectral imagery (CASSI). Aside from spatial coding in CASSI, polarization encoding is introduced in the proposed system by the PPA. As side information, an RGB image captured by a color camera is used to improve the reconstruction performance. The imaging model and reconstruction algorithm have been presented. An experiment has been carried out to validate the system’s feasibility. The significant advantages of the system are snapshot imaging, no scanning, and suitable for dynamic and static target detection. It gives us an alternative method for acquiring the spatial, spectral, and complete linear polarization information of the targets with a snapshot measurement. •A compressive sensing based imaging spectropolarimeter is developed to acquire the complete linearly-polarization spectral images of the object by combining coded aperture snapshot spectral imagery and pixelated polarizers array.•The multidimensional information of targets can be reconstructed from a snapshot measurement.•An RGB camera was introduced to improve the reconstruction performance as the side information.